AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 383

A company is running a multi-tier ecommerce web application in the AWS Cloud. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances with an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. Amazon RDS is configured with the latest generation DB instance with 2,000 GB of storage in a General Purpose SSD (gp3) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. The database performance affects the application during periods of high demand.

A database administrator analyzes the logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and discovers that the application performance always degrades when the number of read and write IOPS is higher than 20,000.

What should a solutions architect do to improve the application performance?

Answer options

• A. Replace the volume with a magnetic volume.
• B. Increase the number of IOPS on the gp3 volume.
• C. Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume.
• D. Replace the 2,000 GB gp3 volume with two 1,000 GB gp3 volumes.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon RDS gp3 storage volumes support a maximum of 16,000 IOPS, meaning they cannot scale to handle the application's requirement of over 20,000 IOPS. Upgrading the database storage to a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume resolves this issue because io2 volumes can scale up to 256,000 IOPS. Magnetic volumes provide significantly worse performance, and RDS does not allow users to manually split a single database volume into multiple gp3 volumes.